Sunday, August 25, 2013

There are a number of books at LC
with this bookplate and I would like to find out who was the original
owner.

The books were bound in Rio de Janeiro. So possibly a Brazilian owner?

Cfox@loc.gov

Cheryl Fox

Collections
Specialist

Manuscript
Division

Library of
Congress

101 Independence Avenue,
SE

Washington, DC
20540-4600

phone
202.707.3303

fax
202.707.6269

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Note from Lew

For good reason, I bitch and moan about all the terrible politicians in Washington and sometimes forget how many hard working dedicated people are working at organizations like The Library Of Congress and
The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration

I am intentionally keeping this posting brief because I want to encourage you to look at this link from the Bureau Of Archives.

CORRESPONDENCE AND OTHER WRITINGS OF SIX MAJOR SHAPERS OF THE UNITED STATES:

* American Book-Plates by Charles Dexter Allen
** Catalog of the Franks Collection of British and American Bookplates Bequeathed To The British Museum by Sir Augustus Wollaston Franks
Mr. Allen attributes the bookplate to Peter Maverick but this is highly unlikely.
It is also possible that Allen was describing a bookplate for another person named William Stephens .
The quest begins. I will keep you updated as my research continues...
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

From time to time I still use" archaic" words like dungarees and valise
I remember how Tomatoes tasted before the advent of corporate genetic alteration.
That's why I am a card carrying member of this organization.

The rebirth of an old idea- From The New York Times July 29,2013

Some Hotels Offer people an escape from electronic addiction (My Words)

Daniel Rosenbaum for The New York Time

"Reading material in many hotel rooms has become about as spare as it can be — open the desk drawer and it might hold a Gideon Bible and a Yellow Pages.

But some hotels are giving the humble book another look, as they search for ways to persuade guests, particularly younger ones, to spend more time in their lobbies and bars. They are increasingly stocking books in a central location, designating book suites or playing host to author readings. While the trend began at boutique hotels like the Library Hotel in New York, the Heathman Hotel in Portland, Ore., and the Study at Yale in New Haven, it is expanding to chain hotels.

For these chains, a library — or at least the feel of one — allows a lobby to evolve from a formal space to a more homelike atmosphere, one that younger customers seek. Adam Weissenberg, vice chairman for the travel, hospitality and leisure groups at Deloitte, said, “My general impression is that this ties into changing demographics.” He added, “Younger travelers want to be part of the community.”

As with any other change in a hotel, there is a financial angle. Room revenue in hotels rose 6.3 percent in 2012 compared with a year earlier, but food and beverage revenue increased only 2.3 percent, according to PKF Hospitality Research Trends.

For hotels, the challenge is to persuade guests to spend more time, and money, in restaurants and bars, rather than venturing outside.

The Indigo Atlanta-Midtown hotel, for example, has a separate space in the lobby it calls the Library, with books, newspapers and coffee. The Indigo Nashville Hotel also has a library-style seating area.

Country Inns and Suites, with 447 hotels, now has an exclusive arrangement with Penguin Random, called Read It and Return Lending Library, that allows guests to borrow a book and return it to another location during a subsequent stay.

Scott Meyer, a senior vice president at Country Inns, says the goal is to provide guests, 40 percent of whom are business travelers, with “something they didn’t expect.”

Since early July (a version of the program was begun in 2001) the hotel chain has offered novels by Dean Koontz and Steve Berry and other Random House authors, as well as children’s books. A corporate blog contains an excerpt from Mr. Koontz’s March release, “Deeply Odd.” The circulating books for both authors will be from the backlist.

Mr. Berry is enthusiastic about a new outlet for his work. He called it “the easiest, most efficient, carefree way to put books into the hands of readers.”

In June, the Hyatt Magnificent Mile in Chicago completed a renovation that includes a bar stocked with books and magazines and a small number of computers.

Marc Hoffman, the chief operating officer of Sunstone Hotel Investors, which owns the hotel, says he has also brought the library concept to Sunstone’s other hotels, including the Renaissance Washington, D.C., Downtown Hotel which has books about presidents and sports; the Newport Regency Beach Hyatt; and the Boston Marriott Long Wharf, where he says books about the Boston Celtics, fishing and baseball are popular.

“We’re creating spaces people can relax in,” he said.

Bookstores and Web sites supplying hotels report an uptick in business. The Strand bookstore in New York, for example, sells books to the Library Hotel and the Study at Yale, as well as to hotels in Dallas, Houston, New Orleans, and Philadelphia, among others. Jenny McKibben, who coordinates the store’s corporate accounts, estimates that 60 percent of corporate business stems from hotels or design firms working for hotels.

Before the recession, she said, 15 to 20 hotels a year would call to order books. Now, with increased guest interest and newer technology that allows hotels to review pictures and title lists, the number of hotels ordering has increased to about 40 annually. “It’s a new luxury item,” she said of books.

Meanwhile the boutique hotels are personalizing a library-like experience even more.

At the Library Hotel in New York, where individual floors are assigned numbers from the Dewey decimal system and rooms have books within that classification, the hotel ran a haiku contest in April to celebrate National Poetry Month.

Steven Perles, an international lawyer practicing in Washington and a frequent guest, didn’t participate in the contest, but during a recent stay he considered his choice of the hotel. “Books are so much part of the appeal,” he said, although on an earlier trip he said he stayed in a room designated for Slavic languages and couldn’t understand any of them. Still, he gives the hotel high marks for its service.

Powell’s Books in Portland, Ore., supplies books to the Heathman Hotel in that city. Authors appearing at the bookstore or nearby Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall, who stay at the hotel, go through a ritual of signing their most recent work to add to the hotel’s collection. The hotel has nearly 2,100 books signed by authors including works by Saul Bellow, Stephen King and Greg Mortenson. Guests have access to the library each evening.

Some hotels are staging author readings. Ahead of President Obama’s second inauguration, Lewis Lapham, editor of Lapham Quarterly and former editor of Harper’s Magazine, read excerpts from “A Presidential Miscellany,” a book he wrote, at the St. Regis Hotel in Washington.

The Algonquin Hotel in New York is looking to build on its rich literary history with a suite stocked with books from Simon & Schuster.

On a recent evening, more than 125 people gathered in the hotel’s main lobby to hear Chuck Klosterman, the author, essayist and columnist on ethics for The New York Times, read from his latest work, “I Wear the Black Hat,” published by Simon & Schuster.

Mr. Hoffman said that hotel books could become a souvenir. He says every book is stamped with the hotel name. And he concedes that some guests may take them home.

“We hope they remember the trip, remember the good times and go back again,” he said."
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Whatever comes around goes around.

Let's turn the clock back to the days when men smoked segars.Many hotels had reading rooms.Here are just a few bookplate examples:

Parker House Engraved By J.W. Spenceley

If any of you have some unusual hotel bookplates please send me a scan and I will add it to this posting

Bookplatemaven@hotmail.com

8/18/2013: Just Received this note:

Dear Mr. Jaffe:

I
saw with interest your blog post on hotels in the US that have books and reading
spaces available to guests.

I
don't know about the general trend in Europe, but last summer, my husband and I
stayed in a hotel in Brussels during a bad heat wave that offered such an
amenity. It was the Hotel Sofitel in Brussels located in Place Jourdan [a lovely
jewel-box of a place, I might add].

The
only negative thing I can say about it was that there initially was the
ubiquitous loud and intrusive music that seems to be thought necessary to be
piped in everywhere. When I requested that it be turned down or off in the
library space, however, the staff immediately complied.

We
spent every morning of our stay in the hotel's library space, as we didn't want
to venture out into the oppressive heat and sun. And we indeed did spend money
inside the hotel, enjoying the coffee and fabulous pastries that were brought to
us there. I am a bad traveler, but this was one of the most enjoyable
experiences I've ever had in a hotel and I remember it fondly.

Sunday, August 04, 2013

I never gave much thought to what might be the oldest American bookplate until several very thoughtful dealers forwarded a blog posting by Rebecca Rego Barr at The Fine Books BlogREBECCA REGO BARRthis is what she wrote" This week I am at the University of Virginia's Rare Book School taking a week-long course called Provenance: Tracing Owners and Collections, taught by David Pearson. Topics include "inscriptions, paleography, bookplates, heraldry, bindings as provenance evidence, sale catalogues, tracing owners, and the recording of provenance data in catalogues" -- in other words, absolutely fascinating stuff, and a lot of it. I intend to write up a better report once the rigorous week comes to a close, but for now, perhaps an answer to a question posed today during a discussion of bookplates. What was the first American bookplate? Sources report that the 1642 bookplate of Massachusetts printer Stephen Daye (printer of the Bay Psalm Book) was the first. Finding an image, however, proved more than a quick Google search away. So classmates--and interested readers--is this the first American bookplate?

According to The Bookplate Annual for 1921, which is where I pulled this image from, "The general consensus of opinion is that it is indeed the bookplate of the Cambridge printer." (No matter the spelling difference; as we are learning this week, that was very fluid in the 17th c.) However, is it not truly a book label since it was printed and not engraved or etched as bookplates generally are? "

This was my response:

Dear Rebecca,The question is simple enough but the answer is more complicated..Once you start delving into early 18th century American bookplates you are probably dealing with Anglo- American plates from the libraries of royal governors and large land holders like Lord Baltimore.Most of the bookplates were not dated so I suspect your quest is a major research project.I can ,if you wish, ask the question on my bookplate blog..www.bookplatejunkie.blogspot.c...Cordially,,Lew Jaffe

The original question was posted on several websites and newsletters .

David Szewczyk's response was very thought provoking.

This was David's Response:

Date: Wed, 31 Jul 2013 09:20:58 -0400I

Vic and others,At the bottom of the blog I see:"However, is it not truly a book label since it was printed and not engravedor etched as bookplates generally are?"Bookplates of the 15th- and 16th-century, and well into the 17th-century, arewoodcut or printed from type. Very, very few of that period are engraved.19th- and 20th-century bookplates can be lithographed, chromolithographed,linocut, woodengraved, photomechanically produced, etc. It would be verydifficult for an Anglo-American bookplate of the 17th-century to be engraved(in the New World) for that art is late in arriving in the Anglo colonies andwas not practice in the 1640s.Now about "America." It is being used in a very Anglo-centric way.Libraries, both institutional and private, existed in Spanish America morethan 100 years before they did in the English colonies. The earliestbookplates for Mexico, as far as we know (but much research is still needed)are in books that belonged the Jesuit establishments and were a woodcut stampon pieces of paper that were affixed to pastedowns and other blank areas.Other times the stamp was simply used as a stamp. These date from as early asthe 1580s.Be well,

David Szewczyk

I Confess, I have an Anglo-centric bias and do not think in terms of the other countries which had a foothold in what was to become America.If you eliminate the Spanish settlers on the west coast , the French colonists in The Louisiana Territory and focus only on English settlers and land owners what is the earliest American Bookplate?Perhaps it is this one dated 1702